Guys... we shipped more IdleJourney :D

Play Idle Journey: https://idle-journey.com

Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/pNc4CFRjvk

Idle Journey is a browser-based idle RPG inspired by old-school MMORPGs like RuneScape (of course). It’s been almost 2 years since I started this project. During this time, I hired some folks, had to let some go due to financial pressure, quit my job for 6 months trying to dedicate all my time into IdleJourney, had to get a new job, raise 2 kids, and nurture my relationship with my wife... just a lot of stuff happened while IdleJourney was cooking. Right now, we are a team of 2 developers: me, as the lead, and another very talented developer I have the pleasure of working together for 1 year now. And I can produly say we built everything I wanted from day zero. Now, it’s a matter of just adding more..... Journey to this Idle! hehe

Idle Journey is no longer 100% free, but you can play for hundreds of hours for free before commiting $10 to unlock the rest of the game.

But before I get into the changelog, I want to share a pretty big gamedev blunder on my part.

So, Idle Journey originally used island-based progression. You would unlock one island, play through its enemies, resources and bosses, then move to the next one. It was simple and very easy to understand.

There was nothing wrong with it, but Idle Journey is heavily inspired by RuneScape, and since we were working on our first multiplayer systems, I started imagining the game as one big connected world. In my head, that sounded obviously better. More MMO-like. More RuneScape-like even... So I allocated me and my team to design one single world map.

We went on a 4 month side-quest focusing on that direction while players were waiting for new content. And when we were finally over with it.... we watched the numbers drop. People didn’t like the game as much. And neither did I. It was so hard to guide the players trough the game now, it was very overwhelming. The world felt big but pointless. It lacked direction.

At that point in time, I was considering just calling it and giving up. I made our game worse and that felt very bad. All the time wasted... Then, sunk cost fallacy started creeping in hard. "We already spent so much time on this.", "Maybe we just need to polish it more.", "Maybe players will get used to it."

But at some point we had to stop defending the decision and admit the game felt worse. So we sucked it up and reverted it. Once we went back to island-based progression, the game immediately felt better again - and we were energized.

The game feels like Idle Journey again!

Note: It wasn’t all wasted work, though. We managed to use the single world map as a base for the new island designs, which means every island got revamped again. So they definitely got better. But that wasn’t the intention.

So yeah...Huge update and a rollback of a costly design mistake. But we are now back on track and the game is better now because we were willing to undo a lot of hard work.

Now, Here’s the actual update and a changelog that I couldn’t really write myself without AI tools helping me check over 200 commits with extremely professional commit messages like “BRUH”.

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Idle Journey — What's New

Here's what changed and what's coming.

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🌐 Idle Journey is multiplayer now

The world is alive.

Other players now appear around you, wearing their actual gear, and you can talk to everyone in World Chat — with chat bubbles floating over players right in the world. There's an emoji keyboard, and you can turn chat off anytime in settings. This is the foundation for a lot of what's coming next (including shared bosses — more below).

🌟 New Skill: Astronomy

A brand-new skill. Astronomy is a gather-and-study system: research constellations by unlocking and leveling individual studies with materials you collect. Every study you raise gives a permanent bonus that grows as you level it — so the deeper you go, the stronger you get.

The early-level Astronomy nodes are tuned to play like the other gathering skills.

🏜️ New Area: The Desert

Set sail for an all-new desert island, packed with new things to fight, gather, and collect.

New enemies

• Anubis — a major boss (see below).
• Pharaoh Guards (Lv 95), Mummies (Lv 75), and venomous Snakes (Lv 87) that hit you with a nasty poison.

New gathering

• Cactus and Palm trees to chop.
• A new Sandstone mining tier.
• Desert fishing — reel in Catfish and Koifish.

New gear & items

• A full Sandstone equipment set — 13 pieces covering weapons (sword, 2H, axe, dagger, bow, pickaxe, rod), shield, and a complete armor set (helmet, platebody, platelegs, boots, gloves).
• New chase item: Blue party hat is now obtainable (tip: requires astronomy unlock)
• AOE Tools for mining, fishing and woodcutting! You can now farm multiple nodes at a time
• Lucky ring III
• New potions that boost astronomy
• New jewelry tier (diamond)

🐉 New Boss: Anubis

Anubis is our new boss fight, available in the same 3 difficulty tiers.

How the fight works

• He mixes melee, a charged ranged spell, and a summon that calls in a pack of minions.
• While he's summoning, he becomes invulnerable and shields himself — you can't damage him during the cast.
• Right after summoning he's left stunned and wide open — that's your window to burst him down.
• Kill Anubis and his summoned minions die with him

🃏 New Cards: Desert Collection

A wave of new cards tied to the desert region — collect them from the new content:

• Enemy cards: Anubis (with rare variants), Pharaoh Guard, Mummy, Snake.
• Gathering cards: Cactus, Palm Logs, Perfect Palm Leaves, Sandstone, Catfish, Koifish, Diamond.

🗺️ Back to an island-based map

We've moved the game back to a hand-built, island-based world instead of the open-world layout we'd been experimenting with. Honestly, open world wasn't the right fit for Idle Journey — it spread content too thin, made progression harder to pace, and pulled focus away from the tight, readable loop that makes an idle game feel good. Islands let us design deliberate, distinct zones (like the new Desert), guide your progression cleanly, and ship new areas faster. You'll still get the new map UI, minimap, waypoints, and Teleport Tethers to move around quickly.

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🧪 Test servers — shipping with more confidence

We now have dedicated test servers. This lets us roll out new features to a live environment before they hit everyone, catch problems early, and ultimately ship more content, more often, without putting your main save at risk. It's a big step toward a faster, steadier update cadence.

⚔️ In development: The Coliseum + World Boss

(test servers first)

The Coliseum is not live yet — it's launching on the test servers next week, and we want you in on it early. It's a new combat arena with escalating waves, hand-crafted challenges, its own token currency, and a shop.

Alongside it, we're putting up an early version of a shared World Boss — a boss the whole server takes on together, made possible by the new multiplayer foundation. Both are early builds going to test servers first so we can tune them with your help before a full release.

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💎 A note on Premium & Idle Tokens

Buy any premium packs to fully unlock the game forever.

During alpha, purchasing either pack — the Quality-of-Life Package or Gotta Go Fast — grants you Premium for life. It's meant to feel like buying the game and everything we add to it down the road, not a subscription.

We've also added Idle Tokens, a premium currency you can earn through normal play or buy in the store — the currency behind cosmetics and convenience items. Expect a steady stream of new cosmetics over time. Yes you can buy timeskips, but they have a weekly limit and cannot be used on new content. This should strike a good balance of funding for the game and keep the playerbase pacing in check.

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⏳ A note on Time Skips

To keep new content meaningful, brand-new content can't be rushed with Time Skips for at least the first couple of months after it launches. The one exception is the early-level Astronomy nodes, which behave like the other gathering skills.

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Thanks for playing during alpha — your support literally funds what comes next. See you in game!

AI disclosure: Item icons and some UI icons are mostly generated by AI. Claude code helps a lot on coding tasks and even writting this changelog. Thats it, all 3d assets and VFX were either bought from AssetStore or made by us

Hey everyone, I’m Guilherme, one of two developers of Idle Journey (we're from Brazil btw)

We just released a new test server for Idle Journey. This update took us around 6 months to build, and now we need players to help us test the new features.

For those who dont know - im kidding barely anyone knows about us - Idle Journey is an idle RPG inspired by old-school MMORPGs like RuneScape. The game is about slowly progressing through skills and just chill with other people.

The new test server includes:

• Multiplayer
• New monsters
• New bosses
• The Coliseum
• A brand new skill: Astronomy
• Over 500 items
• 9 skills
• Over 100 different node types, including enemies, trees, rocks, constellations, and fishing spots

To be very clear: this is the test server. It may be buggy, unbalanced, or unfinished in some places. Please do not interact with the store in the test server, or i will have to refund you lol just dont.

How to play:

Test server:
https://idle-journey.com:8443/play

Live server (stable, no mutliplayer, 6 months of updates behind):
https://idle-journey.com/play

Discord:
https://discord.gg/pNc4CFRjvk

If you like RuneScape-like progression, idle RPGs, skilling, rare drops, bosses, and long-term account growth, I’d really appreciate you giving the test server a try.